Coming soon: Quick dip research about sales manager coaching in Australia

A lot of client conversations in the past week or so have ended up coming back to the role of the sales manager in creating change within a sales force. That’s a good thing: the role of the sales manager is absolutely critical to the process. They will need to walk the talk, reinforce new ideas, role-model behaviours, celebrate early wins, translate the ideas to make them relevant to their team, etc. But the most important thing is that they will need to be coaching their team members.

Because of the criticality of the role of the sales manager in driving sales results, as well as in building sales capability, through coaching, I am going to launch a piece of small scale research into current practice in Australia. I want to get a sense of what is happening out there, how sales managers are delivering coaching, how sales people are receiving it, and how organisations are supporting it.

At this point, it will be small scale, as I want to be able to bring results to share with the Australian sales community as soon as possible. It is likely that I’ll launch periodic small-scale research to follow-up on specific areas that come out of our initial quick dip.

I’ll be posting information soon about how to participate in the research, with both a qualitative and quantitative component.

SURVEY LINK: 

Here's a link to the quantitative survey. It is a VERY short survey that should take less than 5 minutes to complete. 

This is ONLY for business-to-business salespeople who have received coaching from their Sales Manager. 

http://svy.mk/11arMqj

Feel free to share this link with your peers, colleagues and friends! 

Building a proactive salesforce

A few years ago we were entering a large engagement for a business process outsourcing company. As part of the engagement, we did a number of interviews with their customers, key contacts in significant accounts. One of the interviews revealed a very interesting insight about our account, but also about what is expected of the modern supplier (or “trusted advisor” or whatever).

“They are terrific,” our account’s customer said, “Whatever I ask them to do, they do it flawlessly.” This is going well, I thought to myself. Clearly, our account is a great and much-loved supplier to this company. He had more to say, though.

“But, you know,“ he added, after I had given him some silence in which to think further about the situation, “in the seven years we’ve been working with them, they have never brought a new idea to me. By now, they know our processes better than I do. So they should be able to point out where I could do things better, more cheaply, etc. They haven’t done that.”

What started out as a very complimentary comment, one that you’d be tempted to put on your website as a reference, ended up as a consistent theme in our consulting work: just doing good work is not enough.

Today’s customers expect a supplier to be proactive, evaluating their business and coming up with ideas for how to improve it. And whether you call it being proactive, challenging, “creativating”, or any other term, that result is the same: if you don’t bring new ideas to your accounts, you’re letting them down.

Being proactive can be a little bit tricky, though. It is critical to maintain your core customer-centric sales philosophy: it should be about *them* and not about you. Any ideas should be focused on solving one of their business challenges, taking advantage of their opportunity, etc. To be successful, you must not be pushing your own product or your own agenda.

Proactivity comes naturally to some salespeople, but it can also be developed. Creating a structure can be useful, encouraging salespeople to be proactive, and even creative, in a structured and organised way. I’ve discussed in other blog posts specific tools that facilitate creative idea generation, and I’m sure I will in future posts as well. So, for now, we’ll those tools aside.

So what should YOU do?

How do you build a proactive sales team? Here’s a few ideas that I’ve seen work well.

•      If you have regular meetings with your existing accounts, include one agenda item that is outside the current project or process. Even if the meeting is a progress meeting, you can add one point at the end of the discussion that is focused on “Additional ideas” or similar. One client suggests that each quarterly review meeting must include at least one new business idea.
•      Schedule a regular meeting that is NOT about current work. One of our accounts requires its sales team to schedule one “Agendaless Meeting” per year. This doesn’t mean that there is no preparation, of course. But it signals to the account that the conversation is wide open, new ideas, and new opportunities. During the meeting, try to defer discussions about current work until the regular meetings.
•      Make sure that the internal team is meeting periodically, and include as many parts of the organisation as possible. Brainstorming with account teams is a great idea, and you will often find that your own team brings up ideas that you’ve not thought of for the account. Involve as many people who touch the account as possible, as they are more likely to bring new ideas. One of our office product accounts created a whole new business opportunity when a service person, who had been onsite to fix a hardware problem, noticed client personnel going through a tortuous series of steps to complete a process. It turned into a new service, and relieved a lot of pain of which the organisation wasn’t even aware.
•      Share new ideas internally. Those of you that know me know that I am not a fan of generic ideas or scripted solutions for customers. However, there is a lot to be learnt from good ideas that succeed at other accounts, and good ideas should be leveraged. When you bring the idea to another account, though, don’t forget to tailor it!

Encouraging a salesperson to be proactive can be tricky. As I said before, some just do it naturally. But with a bit of coaching and a bit of structure, even those who do not can start be a proactive, value adding partner to their accounts.

Does anyone else have ideas for how to increase proactivity – particularly in bringing new business ideas to accounts – in your sales team? 

Avoid generic sales presentations

Presentations. Oh dear. So often sales presentations stumble severely, focusing too much on the supplier and not enough on the customer.

I’ve seen numerous examples of companies forcing their sales teams to use the same presentation template for all of their accounts. At the heart of the concept is a good idea: customers *should* have a consistent experience of dealing with your organisation. There *should* be a distinct feel to your team, as differentiated from your competition.

However, what tends to happen is these good intentions disintegrate into a generic, self-oriented document that gives little thought to the specific needs of the actual client in question.

Last week I had an interesting conversation with one of our clients, who wanted to make sure that his salespeople were presenting solutions in a consistent way to all of their accounts. This makes some sense, of course. But the execution was terrible, and I’ve seen this before.

The *required*presentation deck ran something like:

• A cover page featuring their branding, their logo, their colours, and a small mention of the client
• Their business, their background, and where they are based
• A history of the brand, including the evolution of the logo (!)
• A map showing their sales offices around the world
• A map showing their production facilities around the world
• A photograph of their heritage-listed corporate headquarters building
• Etc…

In this standard deck, it was at least 8 pages before it got to the key business issues facing the account. Even worse, the client had been running training programmes to make sure that everyone delivered the first 8 pages exactly the same way!

While consistency is clearly important, you need to make sure that your salespeople are starting with the situation from the *customer* perspective. This is especially true if you have senior people in the audience. In the example above, you will have lost your senior attendees well before you even got close to the value that you can bring to them.

To be successful, start with the situation, and the business impact it creates. If your audience wants to talk about you – and they probably don’t – you can include your history, locations and a photo of your offices in the Appendix, in case it comes up.

Oh – and I’ll comment on this specific issue in later posts – you also need to *trust* (and upskill!) your sales team enough that they don’t need a script. It is possible to be both customer-centric AND consistent to the brand, but you need your team to be capable of executing.

So what should YOU do? 

• Make sure that all presentations, proposals, agendas, etc. start with the customer issue, not your organisation. From *their* perspective, what is the issue? Why should *they* care?
• Push your sales team to tailor the standard content to address the specific needs that have come up in conversations and research to date. If parts of the standard discussion aren’t relevant, allow your teams to not over them. 
• Coach your teams to focus on the things that really matter to the *account*, not to you. 
• Practice the core components and elements of the sales presentation so that it feels natural, and feels like something that you would say. You shouldn't be reciting a script!